That's it! The exclusion of the images from the project makes the EXE work.
Your advice made me realize my uncoordinated effort to fix the error. The images weren't included in the project before. Then I had an ole error in developing environment that told me to initialize the ImageList before usage. My first take was the inclusion of the images into the project. That didn't help, so I changed the code but didn't remove the images from the project after hat. The removal of one error produced another error even harder to find. Thank you very much for helping out!
I've acquired quite a taste for a well-made mistake... [Fiona Apple]